Asians Creativity to overtake that of Americans?

[Indiana University professor Jonathan] Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

As mentioned in the comments on Tim’s post on choice, Asians have long been pigeonholed as uncreative automatons, who are lacking in innovation.  This article from Newsweek mentions how schools in China are working to eliminate “drill and kill” style learning to encourage creative problem solving.  At the same time, American creativity seems to be declining because of excessive video game playing, teaching to standardized tests, and lack of emphasis on creativity.  It also goes over some interesting results from studies that show creativity can be taught.

The authors of the article define creativity as “production of something original and useful.”  I really like the part where they talk about the “arts” bias.  There is a tendency to say that only people in the arts are “creative people.” While many Asian and Asian-Americans artists and designers are extremely creative, as an engineer and researcher, I have found it annoying and condescending the way that some people in the arts say since I am in a technical field, I am not creative. Asian inventor Dr. Nakamats is certainly creative.

The Newsweek article does have a bit of a yellow peril bent in its “look where the Chinese are going and look where we are going” observation.  While the article criticizes American kids in general for spending too much time playing video games, they don’t point out that some Asian kids often spend hours in front of video games too.  Lots of Asian and Asian-American parents still push doing lots of rote work.

Still, I think the article has good points to make. It was left me saddened about the direction of education in the United States.  From situations where it isn’t safe to go to school to the movement to a rote, teach to the test educational model that Asian countries are moving away from, I am not left optimistic.